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Would Wild Roses, by any other name, smell like a hit?

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By BILL BRIOUXspecial to the star

Tue., Jan. 6, 2009timer3 min. read

Can a title make or break the success of a TV show?

ABC tried to talk producer Marc Cherry out of naming his series Desperate Housewives. Cherry stuck to his guns and the show was an instant hit. Seinfeld was originally called The Seinfeld Chronicles until the similarly titled Marshall Chronicles beat it to the air – and was quickly cancelled.

How would a show called Cowgirls have fared? We'll never know now that CBC, after testing the title, decided to rebrand it as Wild Roses. The Calgary-based drama begins tonight at 9 on CBC.

The series was created by Amy Cameron, who teamed with two other Canadian Film Centre grads – her sister, writer-producer Tassie Cameron (Flashpoint), and actor-turned-producer Miranda de Pencier – on the project.

De Pencier was checking out an in-flight magazine when an article about the booming oil town of Calgary caught her eye. She huddled with Amy, who was working on a generational project centred on sisters.

"I wanted to write about two families: one wealthy, one rural, a Shakespearean world of opposites," says Amy. Although Cameron spent a few years growing up on a farm outside Peterborough ("My earliest memories are of me on a horse," she says), she's a self-described Toronto "city girl." When she headed west to research Wild Roses, she was struck by the dichotomy of the Calgary landscape: how the booming city sprawls towards an urban frontier and then abruptly stops.

It was a line in the ground she wanted to explore. What she ended up with is a show about the boom town of Calgary living side by side and clashing with the old ranching world.

Cameron's title for the venture was Cowgirls. "I thought that would bring the men in," she says. CBC went with Wild Roses and Cameron eventually bought into it. "It's not a western; it is the new Wild West, about these urban cowgirls."

If viewers call it Dallas set in Calgary, however, Cameron has no problem with that. "It is a modern Canadian Dallas," she says.

The series even has its own J.R. Ewing: David McGregor, an oil exploration baron played by Gary Hudson. In the opening episode, we see that McGregor's father was so fond of one of his farmhands that he bequeathed a parcel of his land to the faithful worker.

David, who covets the late farmhand's wife, now wants that piece of land back. David's handsome sons covet the widow's beautiful cowgirl daughters and before you can say "Southfork," entanglements ensue.

Hudson has his own connections to the Dallas era. The 52-year-old Virginia native cut his acting teeth on the Aaron Spelling prime-time soaps of the day, including Dynasty and The Colbys. He even shot a few Dallas episodes and remains friends with Mary Crosby, the actor who became famous for portraying the woman who shot J.R.

"Our show is very similar to a lot of the shows Aaron Spelling created," says Hudson. "People love to follow the lives of these people, just like they did on Melrose Place. Plus, around the world, oil as a subject matter is on everybody's minds."

Hudson drops names like George Clooney, Michelle Pfeiffer and Robin Williams when describing the people he came up with through acting and improv schools.

When he first moved to Los Angeles, he met a girl from Montreal. That relationship opened doors for him in Canada and he's been busy north of the border for much of the past dozen years, appearing in shows like Smallville, Mutant X, Doc and Paradise Falls. He's now a dual citizen.

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The big difference between Wild Roses and Dallas is the location work on the new series, says Hudson. "Dallas, Dynasty – we did all that on sound stages. On (Wild Roses), we shoot everything on location."

Not that this has made Hudson any more of an expert in the saddle. The horse wranglers on the Wild Roses set have worked with the likes of Heath Ledger (Brokeback Mountain) and Robert Duvall (Broken Trail). Hudson says that when he rides by, the wranglers shout out a warning: "Actor on horse! Actor on horse!"

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